Tokyo School Life – Nintendo Switch – Review

Game: Tokyo School Life
System: Nintendo Switch
Publisher/Developer: PQube
Price: £12.99| $14.99| € 14,99
Age Rating: EU 12+| USA E
Release Date: 14 February 2019
Also available on: PC

Review code kindly provided by PQube

Tokyo School Life is a visual novel dating sim developed and published by PQube. It released for PC in 2015 and has been ported to the Nintendo Switch as of February 14th.

Late For My First Day Of School

Tokyo School Life starts with you a male protagonist arriving in Japan and making it to his first day of school as an exchange student. The exchange is for two months and for some reason you didn’t have time to arrive any earlier than just before school. This results in some unfortunate introductions with the trio of female characters. Who it turns out are residing at the same dormitory you are. Eventually things cool down and you become close friends.

Karin is a tsundere (rough on outside, soft on inside) who loves cute things. Sakura is a sickly closet otaku (geek). Aoi is kind, a great cook and athletic. There aren’t a lot of dialogue choices but the few do matter. As halfway through the game you’ll be able to choose which girl you go after. I noticed that Karin didn’t quite like me. Not that it’s hard to get the right one without a guide. Once you’ve picked though you can just enjoy the ride as you won’t have to say anything. Having the intro sequence be so long is a bit of a pain, but it allows you to get a feel of all the girls before making your decision.

The Japanese Experience

The game has a nice amount of options for the text. As there is the normal bottom text but also a sub window which appears on the top left corner. The language options are English, full Japanese, just Hiragana or Romanji. You can choose to have no sub window if you want. This is very useful for anyone interested in learning Japanese as all voice acting is that. So you could have the English high up if you need to check and there are different choices for varying levels of learning.

As someone who’s been interested in Japanese culture I didn’t learn too much. It isn’t helped by using fake names instead of the actual thing to avoid copyright issues. For example instead of Comiket they say Comipro. If somebody wanted to know what that was they’d have trouble figuring it out. I also  learned a bit more about American culture as that’s obviously where your character is from. As I learned that in America their classes are split based on people’s school performance. Whereas in Australia the only classes that are split are Maths and English and ESL.

Visual Literature

The character designs are cute but it seems almost like they’re from a dress up game. With some of the movement I can see that they’re probably 3D models. The only characters that are modeled are the main three and they have some upper body movement. A few story instances might have some characters drawn in a still picture bit but that’s it. It can make the world feel lifeless. Sometimes the backgrounds are actually just photographs with things blurred out. Their models also are depicted as walking without the background changing and it looks a little odd. The bit behind the main text is also semi transparent which might make it hard to read for some people.

The music isn’t particularly special, just normal visual novel tracks. Asides from your character’s thoughts and scene setting the entire game is voice acted. It’s entirely in Japanese but as the main point of this visual novel is to help with learning Japanese and its culture, I can understand it. I also like that when a character is in another room they muffle the voice acting to give it that effect. They also have some times where they speak a line of English and it is just too adorable. The only control issue I had was that moving the joy-stick would also work the same way as the A button and I’d accidentally skip a line.

Overall

This game is definitely for teenagers at least. There are a few sections of weird dialogue such as when one needs help with sunscreen. As well as a couple of scenes where you accidentally walk in on changing so they are half dressed. But on the whole it’s quite a cute game that left a smile on my face. Make sure you watch for the after credits segments.

I like it a lot!